Future Contingents, Indeterminacy and Context

Abstract

In Facing the Future, Belnap et al. reject bivalence and propose double time reference semantics to give a pragmatic response to the following assertion problem: how can we make sense of assertions about future events made at a time when the outcomes of those events are not yet determined? John MacFarlane employs the same semantics, now bolstered with a relative-truth predicate, to accommodate the following apparently conflicting intuitions regarding the truth-value of an uttered future contingent: at the moment of utterance, if asked to evaluate the truth-value of the asserted future contingent one has the intuition that the assertion is neither true nor false, yet later, at the moment of the predicted event, one has the intuition that the assertion was, already, either true or false. Both MacFarlane and Belnap assume that assertions of future contingents have complete propositional content -the traditional propositional contents that, according to him 'are the contents of assertions and beliefs'. This assumption is challenged.

Relativism and Two Kinds of Branching Time

“…One prominent 'no actual future' view is the Growing Block Theory, which holds that while past and present things and events are real, future things and events are not (Broad, 1923;Tooley, 1997). (The Growing Block 4 Both Sweeney (2015) and Cariani (2021, §11.3) also reject the Non-Determination Thesis in favor of the Standard View, but their views have certain non-standard features. Consider an actual situations in which someone utters something.…”

Ockhamism and Philosophy of Time

“…This challenge takes two forms. One form is sometimes referred to as the assertion problem (although it generalizes to other illocutionary acts) and has been pressed by Green (1994, 2001), Perloff and Belnap (2011), Stojanovic (2014), andSweeney (2015). In response I argue that a sentence can have truth conditions, and thus a determinate content, even if it lacks truth value at its moment of utterance.…”

Future Contingency and Classical Indeterminism

“…7-8). Mignucci's attempt to explain away this and similar pieces of evidence(2001, p. 252 n. 323) seems to me unconvincing.21 The positions advanced byBrogaard (2008) andSweeney (2015), ostensibly as alternatives to McFarlane's (and by implication Kretzmann's) position, seem to me to be notational variants thereof. See alsoDummett (1981Dummett ( , pp.…”